Saturday, 10 May 2014

BCS President's Monthly Bulletin April 2014

That very rare
event of a nice British Bank Holiday weekend meant that this monthly bulleting
comes out a few days later than planned as it was just too nice to be sitting
indoors at the computer and the garden really did need a lot of work on it. So
if you have been regularly checking the website for my latest musing, I
apologise to both of you.

BCS Events

Historical Military
Mapping Group Bomber Command Study Tour

The HMMG Bomber
Command Study Tour that took place in early April proved to be a huge success
despite some initial problems with getting it off the ground. As it turned out
the timing coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg
Raid, Bomber Command’s costliest operation of the war in terms of aircraft and
crew lost. This was brought home on the first stop on our tour, The Lincolnshire
Aviation Heritage Centre, an aviation museum in East Kirkby. The day prior to
our arrival a cross had been laid out representing the 95 aircraft and over 700
crew who didn’t return. Over the three day tour we visited a number of sites
associated with Bomber Command, the highlight of which was RAF Coningsby, the
home of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. The aircraft had spent the
winter being serviced and made ready for the upcoming display season and we
were very fortunate to be treated to an impromptu flying display by the Dakota
and a Spitfire, with the Lancaster also outside its hangar with all four
engines running – a sight and sound not to be missed. A full report of the
Study Tour will appear in the Summer issue of Maplines.

The old and the new, Lancaster in the foreground, Typhoon in the background

Map Curators Workshop

The
next SIG event apart from Symposium activities will be the Map Curators Group
workshop in Birmingham in early September. The theme of the MCG 2014 Workshop
is: "Hands across the map; co-operation and partnership in map
collections". It is being held in the University of Birmingham in their
Conference Centre. The Workshop will be held on Wednesday 10 September.
On the Tuesday 9 September a training day for those who find they have to
deal with maps or need to refresh their knowledge entitled, "Feral maps
and how to tame them" has been organised. On Thursday 11 September a visit
to a map collection will take place. Full details will shortly be available via
the BCS website, so keep checking for details.

BCS Annual Symposium

And having mentioned the Symposium this
year’s looks like it might outdo even last year’s anniversary event in
popularity. By the close of the early bird deadline on 30th April,
we had already had 105 delegates signed up and since then the number has risen
to over 120, an impressive number still six weeks ahead of the event. The full
details of a very impressive programme of talks and workshops is available on
the website, so if you haven’t already booked check out all that is happening
and get your registration in soon.

Geographical Association Conference

For the first time the BCS had a stand and
ran a workshop at the Geographical Association Conference at the University of
Surrey in mid-April. To quote from their website, “The Geographical Association (GA) is a UK-based subject association
with the charitable objective of furthering geographical knowledge and
understanding through education. We support teachers, students, tutors and
academics at all levels of education through journals, publications, training
events, projects, websites and by lobbying government about the importance of
geography.”

The main reason for BCS attendance was to
increase awareness of the BCS amongst the education sector and to publicise our
Restless Earth workshop. We were very successful in both cases. We signed up a
few new members and certainly increased awareness through talking to a lot of
the delegates about what we had to offer as a Society. Of particular interest
was the fact that we got a lot of enquiries from primary school staff about
what we could do for the younger age groups, something for us to ponder on. As
there was no pre-booking system for the workshop we were totally unsure of how
many delegates would turn up to the abridged version of the Restless Earth
Workshop, condensed to 45 minutes to fit our allocated slot. As it turned out
we were full and I think the stewards actually had to turn delegates away; it
generated a huge amount of interest and we have already had several enquiries
about running workshops in 2014/15 as a direct result.

Cartography in the
news

As
part of the government’s reform of qualification and the curriculum to "better prepare pupils for life after school",
the Department for Education has
recently published its GCSE Subject Content for a number of subjects including
Geography and it is heartening to see that maps and cartography feature quite
strongly. This publication sets out the learning outcomes and content
coverage required for GCSE specifications in geography.

The main body of
the document includes two specific references to maps and GIS and states that the
GCSE specification should enable students to:

“develop and extend
their competence in a range of skills including those used in fieldwork, in
using maps and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and in researching
secondary evidence, including digital sources; and develop their competence in
applying sound enquiry and investigative approaches to questions and hypotheses
(study like a geographer”

It
should enable students to demonstrate skills including:

“The use of a range
of maps, atlases, Ordnance Survey maps, satellite imagery and other graphic and
digital material including the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS),
to obtain, illustrate, analyse and evaluate geographical information. To include
making maps and sketches to present and interpret geographical information”

There is also an
annex detailing specific skills to be developed which includes:

I say old chap
these new-fangled developments in mapping are jolly interesting don’t you know.
All you need is a tellurometer, ‘a girl to help’, not forgetting that we are
producing maps at ‘three bus lengths to an inch’, and then you can’t go wrong!
If you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about check out the video clip
at www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7SJVBX7jxo#t=17,
made by Pathé in 1961.

Sorry
I just can’t agree with this as a statement, and even the author concedes
rather arguing against himself, “Is this
the end for paper maps? Absolutely not, they will always be with us. Just used
less widely ….” If the quantity and quality of entries for this year’s BCS
Awards is anything to go by then the paper map is alive and well and in
particularly rude health. Admittedly, they do not all lend themselves to “day
to day” work, but many do and remain the best way of navigating and
understanding the area around you. We cannot afford to be complacent and the
growth of digital and web cartography is causing us to have a rethink about
award categories to better reflect the modern cartographic industry but there
are more than enough instances of paper maps being critically important to
everyday activities. One interesting statistic that backs this up is that in the
last 5 years, search and rescue in Scotland has seen a five-fold increase in
calls due to people taking to the mountains with just their smartphone and then
losing signal or battery strength and getting into difficulties.

The
fact that Newly designed US Topo maps
covering West Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia are now available online for
free download, also shows that the days of the paper map are no quite yet
numbered. The new editions have a crisper, cleaner design - enhancing
readability of maps for online and printed use. The complete article at http://nationalmap.gov/ustopo/
explains how the design is looking to combine the best of both printed and
online to enhance the usability of the product.

MapCarte
for April

The
selection of maps for the month of April covers a wide range of styles and
types from the antique to the ultra-modern and there should be something, as
usual, to suit everybody’s taste. My top three are quite eclectic and cover the
entire range. Wainwright is a name synonymous with memorable cartography, with the
emphasis very much on ‘art’. His hand drawn maps of the Lake District, an
integral part of his pictorial guides, are truly stunning, their clarity and
ease of use enhanced by being ‘simple’ pen and ink compositions. A combination
of planimetric and perspective views enhances their usability and they remain
as useful today as they were when first produced in the 1950s.

John
Ogilby enjoyed the title of His Majesty’s Cosmographer and Geographic Printer
at a time long before the term ‘cartographer’ had been coined. The first time I
saw an illustration of Ogilby’s strip maps, I remember thinking how modern they
looked, their presentation of information clear and linear and not subject to
much of the fanciful artistry of the time. Very simple in conception but ‘breaking
the mould’ in many ways, not least in not maintaining a constant North, they
are easy to read and understand and poring over them today large elements of
the routes are still clearly recognisable.

My
final ‘choice’ is Google Maps. I can’t imagine that many regular users of the
internet are unfamiliar with Google maps and I certainly use it on an almost
daily basis. Whilst stories of mistakes still appear in the press, most
recently the removal of Basingstoke, this really does a disservice to an API
that has popularised mapping and enabled anyone to customise their information and
present it in cartographic formats. Whilst the results of this opening up are
not always pleasing on the eye, it has greatly increased awareness of mapping
and its uses. To quote the Map Carte description, “Quite simply the map is, and continues to be
revolutionary. The 2005 map would get nowhere near MapCarte. The 2014
version is state-of-the-art and in less than 10 years Google are leading big
league cartography and fully deserve inclusion.”

And Finally….

I know I shouldn’t like this, but as an example of map
silliness it works. Featured in the Onion “America’s Finest News Source”, it purports
to show the distribution of Kevins on a global basis, something in which the US
is a world leader and as the website says, ““There
are certainly areas of Australia, the U.K., and Canada where the concentration
of Kevins is high, but they all fall well short of the United States’ Kevin
population across all demographics. And when we look at the benchmark
Kevin-to-John ratio, no country comes even remotely close to the staggering
.205 figure the U.S. posted in 2013.” What more can I say? Full details at http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-us-still-leads-world-with-highest-density-o,35856/

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The British Cartographic Society (BCS) is a dynamic association of individuals and organisations dedicated to exploring and developing the world of maps. Our membership includes mapping companies, publishers, designers, academics, GIS users, and more.